NRO Declassifying Two Cold War Spy Satellites

So the National Reconaissance Office is celebrating its 50th birthday this weekend by throwing a party for 4,000 guests at the National Air and Space Museum's very cool Udvar-Hazy Center.

What's going to be the highlight of a night spent celebrating the secretive agency that operates America's spy satellites? The declassification of two famous Cold War spy sats, of course.

NRO director and former Air Force general Bruce Carlson told reporters during a breakfast in Washignton this morning that the office will be declassifying the KH-7 -8 series Gambit spy satellite that was used to take pictures of the Soviet Union between 1963 and 1984 and the KH-9 Hexagon satellite (shown in a rendering above since its still classified) used between 1971 and 1986.

(Watch this cool old movie about this process called "Catch a Falling Star." Notice how the winch operator just pitches an empty coffee cup out the C-119's open cargo door. Yeah, that wouldn't fly in an AF promo flick today)

All four of the Hexagon's film capsules will be on display and the satellite's body will be partially opened up so that museum guests can look inside to see in inner workings of the 60-foot-long camera, according to Carlson.

The former general recounted just how much IMINT the satellites were able to collect, though it was a bit of a challenge to get the program on its feet:

Running a camera that's 60-feet-long, you think, 'gosh what if it jams, what if something goes wrong, you go to the movies and it does every once in a while.' Well, it didn't happen very often and they took more pictures on the first successful flight of that system than they did in all the U-2 flights that had ever taken place. But you know, there were 12 failures before there was one success. So, it didn't succeed until the 13th shot and in the meantime we'd put pieces of those mechanisms and rockets all over Cape Canaveral and Vandenburg -- we splattered them as far as Finland and Norway. So, it was quite an adventure to get this whole thing off the road and moving.

12 failed launches with debris of a highly classified system strewn close to the Soviet border. Can you imagine such a program being allowed to continue today if information like that were made public? The classified nature of the KH-9 probably kept it alive and relatively safe from criticism -- enabling big risks that eventually led to big technological leaps.

Good luck getting tickets to the party, the wait list already has 200 people on it, according to Carlson.